


Out of the Garden

by SylvanWitch



Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Angst, Daddy Issues, Dark, M/M, Parent/Child Incest, Past Child Abuse, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-08
Updated: 2015-02-08
Packaged: 2018-03-11 04:17:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3313616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The only time he’d touched his father without fear had been to press his hand against the spouting blood and try to keep alive the only person he’d ever loved and loathed.</i> Something of an AU episode tag for the series premiere.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Out of the Garden

**Author's Note:**

> This story is sponsored by the snakes in my brain. Please heed the warnings: Triggers aplenty. There is, however, a happy ending. For a given value of "happy."

Blood like black treacle stains the moonlit grass.

 

He should feel relief and righteousness.  The killer of his father is dead by his, the dutiful son’s, hand.

 

He should feel admiration for the courageous woman beside him, relief in having found brothers in arms who are worth their word.

 

He should feel the muscles of his conscience unclenching.  He’s done what he set out to do:  avenged his father.

 

d’Artagnan feels none of these things.  In fact, he feels nothing.  Not the cold night air, not the impression of Porthos’ hand where he slaps d’Artagnan in comradeship, not warmth at the sight of Aramis’ approving smile.

 

 

Later, in a tavern, the stench of unwashed bodies, spilled wine, and woodsmoke registers only faintly.  The wine has no taste, but it spreads in his belly with a weak chill, and he hunches against the vague sickness gnawing there. 

 

Only after Porthos has bumped his shoulder companionably does d’Artagnan realize that Athos has proposed a toast in gratitude to d’Artagnan.  He acknowledges it with a raised cup, swallows another mouthful of wine.

 

Then the inevitable toast to Alexandre d’Artagnan is proposed, and he finds his hand shaking as he raises his cup.  Thankfully, the others seem to think this is a sign of his sorrow. 

 

They cannot know, these upright, unstained men, how an object can appear dutiful, how ownership can inspire obsessive loyalty.

 

How loss of self can look like love.

 

The only time he’d touched his father without fear had been to press his hand against the spouting blood and try to keep alive the only person he’d ever loved and loathed.

 

There is nothing left of him now that the fire of revenge has burned him out.  He isn’t even a person.  How can he be when the one who allowed him his being is dead?

 

Still, his blood pumps through his veins, his breath goes in and out, his head pounds with a hangover, and he finds himself in the yard at the garrison barracks watching Aramis and Porthos spar, observing the way Athos looks on his fellow Musketeers with assessing eyes.  Such a gaze might give d’Artagnan himself meaning, fill out the empty shape of him where only his father’s eyes had once created fealty out of flesh.

 

He doesn’t know how to ask for what he wants in words, so instead he inspires anger in Athos, taunts him into drawing his sword against d’Artagnan, into cutting him open—a long, red mouth weeping out the proof that something of a self exists independent of what he’d so long been enthralled to.

 

He wants to say, _Take the cup of my blood_.

 

To say, _Father, father, why have you forsaken me_.

 

Wants to sleep in the garden instead of sacrificing himself on the annihilating altar.

 

Instead, he murmurs, “Father?” as Athos helps him to his feet.  Whispers, “Papa?” with Athos’ hand strong and solid against the small of his back.

 

In a tiny room in the garrison, Athos presses a cloth into the shallow, stinging wound on his thigh, and d’Artagnan presses his lips together to suppress the shock of that touch.  Another part of him, however, speaks eloquently, a line of hard flesh rising beneath the leather.

 

Athos’ hand stills in its ministrations, and d’Artagnan can’t look up when he says, “Please.”

 

His father had beaten the begging out of him. 

 

He’d been eleven when his father had made him strip naked under the sprawling blue sky in the field behind their house, had made him lie down on the grass and spread his legs, made him take himself in hand and bring himself to fullness and then had pulled d’Artagnan’s hands away, boot toes pressed into his palms as he lay there crucified by need, begging to be allowed to finish.

 

His father had bent over him, smacked him hard across the cheek, smacked him again and again, open-palmed, obliterative, until blood had bloomed on his tongue to mingle with the snot on his upper lip. 

 

“Don’t beg.  Don’t you ever beg,” his father had said, stroking his hand down d’Artagnan’s shaking chest.

 

But he’d begged again when his father’s hand had touched him, said, “No, please don’t.  Father, no,” and then later, “Yes, oh please, please, please,” until he’d come, shame like a wave sweeping from his toes to his groin and then like a drowning weight dragging him into awful awareness of his damnation.

 

He’d been a bad boy.  He’d disobeyed his father by begging again when he’d been told not to.

 

To punish him, his father had bound and gagged him and left him under the open sky with his spend growing cold and tacky on his belly and his humiliation there for everyone to see.  He’d prayed to God that the cackling crows circling above him in the sky would fly down to peck out his eyes.  How could he ever look at himself or his father or the world again?

 

But the crows had only gone on laughing at him.

 

He had never again pleaded with his father, no matter what the man had demanded of him.  After that day, he’d never prayed again, either.

 

Now, he says, “Please” again and then, “God,” as Athos loosens d’Artagnan’s laces and slides a hand into his smalls to wrap around his hardness and stroke him once, twice, whispering, “Such a good boy,” into his ear, and “So full, so hard for me,” and “Come for me, boy, come now.”

 

A third stroke and a fourth, the callused palm dragging his foreskin away from the glans, too much, he thinks, too rough, just right as he spills, throat working soundlessly, eyes seeping unconscious tears as he shakes through his completion and slides down the wall, legs spraddled, flaccid cock damp in the cooling air, and waits for Athos to slap him, to bind and gag him and leave him there so the others can see what an abomination he is.

 

But Athos is there beside him, knees pressed to his shaking thigh, one hand on the wound to staunch it, the other coming up to wipe tears from his cheeks, to touch his lips as if to still his soundless sobbing, to wrap around the nape of his neck and pull him against Athos’ chest.

 

“Shhh,” Athos murmurs, “It’s alright.  You’ve nothing to be ashamed of.  It happens.”

 

d’Artagnan trembles at Athos’ words, at his gentle touch, almost preferring to be struck.  Blindly, he reaches toward Athos’ cock, saying, “May I?” in the schoolboy voice his father had taught him to use when asking for something.

 

Athos abandons his comforting touch to grip each of d’Artagnan’s wrists in his hands.  “That’s not necessary.  Pleasure can be mutual, but it doesn’t always have to be reciprocal.  I can wait— _we_ can wait—until you’re feeling more yourself.”

 

d’Artagnan’s laugh is sharp and harsh, the croaking laughter of carrion crows.  “And who am I?”

 

“You’re one of us now,” Athos says, as if this should be obvious.  As if d’Artagnan should already have known it.

 

“And who are you?”  His voice sounds thin and high, like the boy he’d been before his father had stripped him of everything he had believed in.

 

“Your brothers.”  Athos says matter-of-factly, reaching toward d’Artagnan to clean him up and tuck him away.

 

“I’ve never had a brother.”  It had been the one small mercy d’Artagnan had clung to all those years:  His father had had only one lump of clay to shape in his own, twisted image, only one rib to bend to his impossible will.

 

“Well, you have three now.”  Evidence of their coupling discretely dealt with, Athos returns to the task of stopping the sluggish bleeding of d’Artagnan’s wound.

 

“Do brothers often do…this…together?”  d’Artagnan’s understanding of family is limited only to his own experience, of course, but it had never seemed as if the village children had played quite the same games with each other as the ones he had learned from his father.

 

Athos shakes his head.  “Few brothers are so lucky.”  He gifts d’Artagnan with a wry smile as Porthos bellows for them from an outer doorway.  “Nor so demanding,” he adds.  He rises gracefully and offers d’Artagnan a hand.

 

Standing beside him in the dim closet, knees still weak from pleasure, lashes still sticky with tears, d’Artagnan takes a deep breath to steady himself, grateful for the pressure of Athos’ shoulder against his own, for the brush of his hand against his back as he urges him out the door and into the world.

 

When he returns to the practice yard, Porthos chivvies him for babying his injury and delaying their practice while Aramis touches his shoulder and says, “Alright?” before handing him his sword.

 

“I am,” d’Artagnan declares for his brothers and God to hear.  From the roof of the garrison, a raucous crow answers.

 

d’Artagnan smiles and raises his sword.


End file.
